]> Introduction to XQuery XQuery as a tool for working with natural-language documents Española, New Mexico Black Mesa Technologies LLC 2012

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 XQuery for Documents Introduction to XQuery as a tool for working with natural-language documents &city-state; &coursedates; &date.last.touched;

This two-day hands-on course introduces XQuery as a programming language for work with natural-language documents.

XQuery is a query and transformation language for XML documents. It can be used to translate XML-tagged data into HTML, to modify the tagging of data, and (of course) to search large bodies of XML material. Many XML processing tasks which are possible but inconvenient in Java, C, or Python are much more convenient in XQuery. This course will focus on the use of XQuery with natural-language documents (books, articles, legislation, etc.) encoded in XML.

Hands-on exercises will give students experience actually writing queries for the interrogation and transformation of XML-tagged documents. Participants should have good knowledge of XML syntax; knowledge of XPath and XSLT (1.0 or 2.0) will be helpful but is not a prerequisite. Familiarity with basic programming concepts (input, output, types, flow of control will be helpful (or alternatively, the ability to confront new concepts without fear).

Materials

Resources for participants in the course include: Course outline (with links to slides) XQuery resources list Sample public data for exercises Initial course announcement (for the record)

Topics and syllabus

The course is divided into eight sessions, four to a day. Topics include:

Introduction

High-level overview of XQuery, background, goals and purpose of the XQuery spec; Hello, world examples.

Location paths

Relative and absolute location paths; child and descendant axes; attributes, predicates. Other axes.

The XDM data model.

Atomic values

Atomic values; simple types; operations on atomic values; important types.

Sequences

Sequences of items; operations on sequences.

FLWOR (for, let, where, order by, return) expressions; nested expressions.

Function declarations; modules; function libraries.

Regular expressions and string manipulation

The standard function library. Regular-expression functions; other string manipulations.

Collections

Collections; operating on a collection.

Full-text

The full-text extensions to XQuery.

What next? Individual work and/or Q/A

Where do you go from here? Individual work or questions and answers; wrapup.

Prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable reading XML documents. Familiarity with XPath, XSLT, and XSD (XML Schema) may be helpful but is not required. Programming experience is not required.

Students may bring their own laptops or may use a classroom machine.